A feature of the Internet or World Wide Web, (WWW or Web) is the ability to transmit electronic data files from one computer to another using various types of file transfer protocols such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Accordingly, the Web has fundamentally changed the way people use data by making vast numbers of documents readily available with little effort. The impact on productivity has been dramatic.
A comparable, and perhaps more significant impact could be realized by enabling a similarly effortless exchange of business data. While many business systems perform well on their own, they tend to be isolated, so that the promise of end-to-end automation has not yet been realized. Ideally, all systems involved in a business process should be able to easily work together to perform a complete transaction. For example, an ordering system which may include sub-systems for inventory, shipping, billing, and receiving should be compatible for processing a complete sales transaction. In such a system, all relevant sub-systems could perform a complete end-to-end business process without human assistance, resulting in dramatic productivity gains and significant shifts in the way business systems operate.
A barrier to improving the integration and automation in business systems is the lack of a simple and standard way to share business data. Web documents are well suited for use by individuals, but they are not naturally or efficiently processed by business systems. It would be far more effective to transfer business data, in its most natural form, (i.e., databases) directly into the business systems that use the data.
To achieve this goal using existing technology, business systems must conform to demanding and cumbersome Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) requirements, or programmers must develop transfer schemes on a case-by-case basis. There is no current standard for transferring business data stored in databases from one location to another over a network without some development effort and/or prior knowledge of the data to be transferred. Therefore, business processing has yet to experience a revolution in productivity comparable to that resulting from the introduction and adoption of the document-centric Web in place today.